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Environmental Book Club

The Delaware Nature Society and Sierra Club of Delaware have partnered for this environmental book club. The books that we read are selected by our book club participants. Books on any environmental topic will be considered, from water, land or air issues to energy, wildlife, land use, transportation, and environmental justice. The number of exciting books on the environment is practically endless.

Upcoming Books

We will be reading Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 by John Berry.

Mark your calendars now for Thursday, September 19th at 6:00pm. We meet on the topmost floor of the DuPont Environmental Education Center in the Russell W. Peterson Urban Wildlife Refuge on the Wilmington Riverfront 1400 Delmarva Lane Wilmington, DE.

Our Recent Books

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl is an American history book written by New York Times journalist Timothy Egan in 2006. It tells the problems of people who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, as a disaster tale.

"Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild" by Renee Askins.is a delightful and compassionate story of a woman whose passion focused on restoring wild wolves to Yellowstone National Park.

University of Delaware professor of English Dr. McKay Jenkins has written a compelling story about the relationships between the toxicity of consumer products and health. "What's Gotten Into Us?" begins as a personal journey to understand the possible causes of a tumor. From this departure point, Dr. Jenkins broaches a wider social discussion of the overwhelmingly risky use of chemicals in cosmetics, household products, food containers, and lawn care, which have infiltrated or runoff into our water supply. Many chemicals used in commercial products are unregulated and present health risks for which many of us are unaware. Dr. Jenkins is a master storyteller who weaves anecdotes with analysis of the challenges of "staying healthy in a toxic world."

Naturalist and environmental philosopher Lyanda Lynn Haupt takes readers on a personal journey of discovery using one of the more ubiquitous birds of modern society, the crow. Haupt interweaves her own personal experiences with crows into a compelling narrative about the role of nature in the urban environment and the historical and multicultural relationships between communities and crows. This is an enjoyable book and was well-liked by the book club.

Winner of the 2008 Audubon Award, Richard Louv challenges us to rethink the importance of nature to healthy child development, not only to mitigate many of the health problems that children increasingly face (obesity, ADHD), but also to ensure that our current and future generations develop relationships and experiences with the natural world that he suggests are so critical to the future conservation of our planet.

Originally published in 1962, Silent Spring is both beautifully written and powerful. Carson is credited for raising public awareness of the impacts of chemical pesticides on ecological and human health and launching the environmental movement in the United States. Her work remains equally relevant fifty years after its first publication.

This highly readable book reviews the history of cod fishing, which spans more than one thousand years and takes readers on a journey from Europe to the Caribbean to the northern Atlantic coast of North America. The story of cod is one of adventure and environmental crisis, and Kurlansky tacks between these themes with a focus on future sustainability and the ocean policies needed to protect cod fisheries.